When it was time to pick my college major, I was torn: Outer space or cyber space? I chose cyber for the job prospects, figuring I could always pursue astronomy as a hobby.

Many years later, and here I am, pursuing it as a hobby. My setup is still pretty basic right now. I'm using a Sony a7 IV, and a Rokinon 135mm f2 lens mounted to a Star-Adventurer 2i tracker that I bought used from eBay. I love a good deal.

I've managed to get some nice photos. Nothing APOD worthy, but I'm having fun learning the constellations and how to find things in the sky. 135mm produces some very wide field shots, and unless there's a big ol' nebula filling the frame, they can feel sort of... flat. Not boring necessarily. These are photos of galaxies and such after all. But flat. Nothing to really draw the eye.

I love the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Deep Field images are some of the most incredible images ever captured by humanity. Having grown up in awe of Hubble images, I have its star patterns seared into my memory. Behold:

Look at the stars! So dreamy, so pointy. There's nothing "flat" about this. Ok, there's a heck of a lot more going on here to add depth than just some star spikes, but they definitely contribute! These are called diffraction spikes. They're an optical side effect of how Hubble captures its images.

See the secondary mirror? It's suspended with some struts. As light enters, it bends around those struts causing the spikes.

Here's a great graphic by NASA:

You can also get them with any camera by stopping down the lens. The light hitting the aperture blades will create some spikes. The pattern will depend on the number and shapes of your lens' blades. Here are some cool spikes I captured on Jupiter with my vintage CZJ Flektogon 35mm:

Stopping down has a major drawback though: way less light. It's probably pretty obvious that when shooting objects 50 million light years away, the amount of light that hits the camera's sensor should be maximized.

The spike pattern is also determined by your lens' construction. I wanted a bit more control. For example, I want to be able to choose the size and shape of the spikes based on what I'm shooting.

The answer? Fake it somehow. I briefly considered just recreating this effect in Photoshop. However, this felt less fun to me. The other option is to do it optically via something called a diffraction mask. This puts fake "struts" in front of the lens so the light has something to hit. It's exactly what happens in Hubble images, just at a much much much much much much much much much much much smaller scale.

I had read online that some people used fishing line or wire. But I have a 3D printer. And when one has a 3D printer, every project suddenly starts requiring 3D printing. I don't make the rules. It's in the contract when you buy the things.

A few minutes of CAD later:

Boom. Baby Hubble. The resemblance is uncanny.

I wasn't expecting much, but the results were actually pretty rad. I shot the Coma Star Cluster in the constellation Coma Berenitis over two nights. Some stacking and processing in Siril later, and:

A wide field shot with some additional depth! NGC 4565 (the Needle Galaxy) added extra flavor.

Some people don't like these spikey stars, and that's ok. Photography is subjective. I personally love them. Plus, as vast as the universe is, we are all looking at the exact same sky. There's only so many ways we can point our cameras up there to capture unique shots. Having one additional lever I can pull to influence the final image helps keep the creative spark alive.

More Levers

I’ve been testing out a variety of patterns to see what results I can get. The goal is to build a library of diffraction masks so I can choose what I want for a given shot. This is ongoing. I may eventually upload these designs to Printables, but they're pretty easy to replicate in any CAD software and will probably need to be resized to fit your lens hood anyway.

In the meantime, if you want the FreeCAD file, let me know.

135mm Gallery

Here are some test shots with my Rokinon 135mm f2 lens. Click an image to expand.

3 Struts

Odd numbers double the spikes.

4 Struts

Even numbers produce the same number of spikes.

6 Struts

Identical to the 3 spoke design. Light is weird.

8 Struts

Here's an image I attempted of the Leo Triplet. After a few hours on night 1, I decided that I didn't really like how the 8 -pointed stars looked near the galaxies. I stopped gathering data and switched to the 4-point mask instead. Theta Leonis at the top looks glorious with 8 points, but the 8-pointed star by the galaxies was too distracting. Again, levers. It's fun to be able to make these additional creative choices, even if I end up scrapping a few hours of data because I'm not liking the results as much as I'd hoped.

Hashtag

This looks identical to the 4-strut design. Light is really weird.

360mm Gallery

Since the original writing of this post, I've acquired a Zenithstar 61 II. The diffraction masks work with this scope too! The lens hood on my 135mm is fixed so I can't adjust the distance between the lens and the diffraction mask. On the Z61, however, the hood (aka dew shield) is extendable. Will this affect the look of the diffraction spikes?

To find out, I printed 3 designs and tested each with the dew shield extended all the way out, all the way in, and somewhere in the middle.

Here are the masks:

I'm naming these The Line, The Wonky T, and The Classic Cross.

Based on the results so far can you guess what pattern each of these will produce?

2 Struts - The Line

Can you tell which one is closest to the lens and which is farthest? Neither can I. There's maybe a very slight difference in spike length, but it's extremely minor if present at all.

They're ordered by closest to farthest from the lens. Moral of the story: Extend the dew shield, put on the mask. Shoot away.

The Line mask is one of my favorites. The spikes can be aimed by rotating the mask. When I'm happy with the orientation I usually lock things down some with painter's tape so it doesn't shift throughout the night. Here's a quick shot I took of M35 with this diffraction mask:

Subtle, but it adds a bit of pizzazz.

3 Struts - The Wonky T

Again, no perceivable difference. The Wonky T produces some nice 4-pointed stars.

4 Struts - Classic Cross

Same results.

Wonky T vs Classic Cross

You'll notice that the Wonky T and the Classic Cross produce the same 4-pointed diffraction spikes. Is there a difference between the two? On the left is the Wonky T, the right is the Classic Cross, both at the farthest dew shield position:

The result is subtle, but the Wonky T produces slightly less bright spikes in one direction. In the above example, the horizontal spikes are just a tiny bit dimmer than the vertical ones.

What's Next?

I'm still experimenting with different mask types but have settled on my two favorites: The Line and the Classic Cross. More than 4 spikes per star starts to look a bit busy, in my opinion. But it could be useful for shots with only a few bright stars.

I'm going to keep experimenting with different diffraction mask types. Here are a few ideas:

• A "donut," where the spokes are attached to a central circle.
• Short spokes that don't extend all the way across the frame.

I also want to see how this impacts multi-night shooting. I did a 4-point shoot on the Leo Triplet over 2 nights, but that was when I was still using a ball head with my standard lens so could keep the orientation exactly the same night to night. Now that I have a longer scope, this will be much harder to replicate, but we'll see...

If you have any other ideas, I'd love to hear them. I'll update this post as I learn more.

Contact

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Just want to chat? My public profiles are on Mastodon and Bluesky. Thanks for reading.

The Messier Catalog contains 110 deep sky object. It's a popular list of targets for amateur astrophotographers. I'm very much an amateur and can barely be considered a "photographer," so I suppose that's me!

Late last year I began pointing my camera skyward. It started with a comet, then I tried the Andromeda Galaxy. One thing led to another and now I have a star tracker, a new lens, and a refractor on the way. Oops, I accidentally found another expensive hobby (Sorry, Molly).

This page tracks all the Messier objects I've captures so far. To make it on this page, the capture had to be at least somewhat intentional.

Gear

Process

Most of these were processed with a combination of Siril, Photomator, and Lightroom.

M3

April 2026
Zenithstar 61 II (360mm)
~2 hours of integration.

This one doesn't have a fun name? Regardless, I love the color variation. It looks like a bunch of sparkling jewels. This was a nice low-stakes target on a partially cloudy night where I didn't have a ton of time to shoot. Easy and fun. A good "quick win."

M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy

November 2025
Rokinon 135mm @ f2
11 minutes of integration, untracked, 3.2s subs

A couple of nights of trial and error and I finally had my first real stack. Solid shot given the gear I had at the time and the slightly cloudy night (I think that's why the brighter stars are glowing a bit). I'm looking forward to trying this one again in 2026 now that I've learned a lot more.

M32 & M110 - Andromeda Satellites

In the above image, there's a smudge on the underside of Andromeda. That's M110! The final entry in the Messier catalog.

There's an even harder to distinguish bright smudgy dot to the left of the core and just on the edge of the ring. That's another galaxy: M32.

Both orbit Andromeda. 3 birds, one stone stack.

M33 - The Triangulum Galaxy

November 2025
Rokinon 135mm @ f2
7.6 minutes of integration, untracked, 4s subs

This was just a test shot to see how large the Triangulum Galaxy appeared at 135mm. With a heavy crop, it's alright. Now that I have a tracker, I want to do a real attempt at this, maybe framing the Triangulum constellation and the galaxy in the same shot.

M35 - The Shoe-Buckle Cluster

April 2026
Zenithstar 61 II (360mm)
20 minutes of integration. My star tracker bugged out and stopped shooting. I only noticed when I came back an hour later. It was getting late and my framing had drifted so I packed up for the night.

In the top left, you'll notice a very faint red nebula. This is IC443, the Jellyfish Nebula. With only 20 minutes, it's very faint in my image. M35 is the cluster of blue stars near the right side of the image. That faint sparkle below is an another star cluster, NGC 2158. I'll probably redo this one when time permits because I really like the framing. This was intended as a test shot so I could learn some new gear and try out some approaches to finding things manually.

M42 & M43 - The Orion Nebula

November 2025
Rokinon 135mm @ f2
10 minutes of integration... It felt like so much more at the time. 3.2s subs. Untracked was a pain.

Part of a much wider Orion molecular cloud photo. This is another I'd really like to devote more time to now that I have a tracker and A LOT more processing experience. I hope to shoot for hours, not minutes.

M44 - The Beehive Cluster

March 2026
Rokinon 135mm @ f 2.4
46 minutes of integration. I was aiming for a few hours, but the clouds rolled in and ruined it. Although, I'm kind of thankful they did. There's not much here that would have been improved by more integration time.

Look closely and you'll notice some diffraction spikes on the brightest stars. I wanted to test out a diffraction mask I made and figured this cluster would be a good target. It wasn't. Still a good learning exercise for tracking and processing.

M45 - Pleiades

November 2025
Rokinon 135mm @ f 2.4
37 minutes of integration

This one really pushed the 3.2s untracked process. I had to stop when I filled my old 64GB memory card, then nearly filled my computer's entire drive while processing. I had to run inside, transfer files, then run back out to grab dark frames. Still, this one turned out pretty great given the constraints in both knowledge and gear. I'm surprised at how much of the faint Taurus molecular clouds I was able to capture with just 37 minutes of integration time.

37 minutes felt like a long time back then. This was the one that pushed me to start researching star trackers. Because, wow. Look at all those wispy clouds. If I could get that with just 37 minutes, what could I get with 3-7 hours? ...it also pushed me to get a new memory card and switch to Fedora for most of my astro processing, but that's a story for another time.

M49, M58, M59, M60, M84, M86, M87, M88, M89, M90, M91, M99, M100

March 2026
Rokinon 135mm @ f 2.4
2 hours of integration. 30 second subs.

That's right. 14 Messier objects in one shot! The Virgo Cluster is the ultimate bang for your buck. I don't blame you if you can't spot them all in the image above. Here's an annotated version:

Galaxies galore! I have spent hours just scrolling through the uncompressed version of the above photo and googling the galaxies I find. Here's the photo annotated with the NGC:

Those are all galaxies. Each contain about 100 billion stars. Most stars have planets. How many weird little aliens are out looking up at us and wondering if they're alone in the universe? Probably at least one. More realistically, billions, or even trillions.

This is why I love astronomy. It really puts into perspective just how small we actually are. Life may or may not be rare, but it is precious. Maybe we should stop bombing each other or something.

Sorry. Back to cool space stuff.

M65 & M66

March 2026
Rokinon 135mm @ f 2.4
5 hours of integration
30 second subs
4 point diffraction mask

It's me. I'm the weird little alien, and dare I say... this photo is actually pretty good. :)

These two, plus NGC 3628 form the Leo Triplet. M65 is the one on the right, M66 is the one on the bottom. The left-most galaxy in the triplet is referred to as the "Hamburger Galaxy" which I find incredible. Astronomers must be a hungry bunch.

M78

Part of the same Orion molecular cloud photo above. This reflection nebula is tiny at 135mm so you're looking at a very heavy crop with low integration time. This was an accidental capture since, but I was shooting the Orion area on purpose, so I'll allow it.

To Be Continued

This post will be continually updated with new Messier object photos as I capture them.

Contact

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Just want to chat? My public profiles are on Mastodon and Bluesky. Thanks for reading.

The Bandai 1/72 scale Resistance X-wing caught my eye a few years ago. Last Christmas I was fortunate to receive one as a gift. These kits have some incredible detail out of the box, but they look VERY unfinished.

This would look OK on a shelf, but even compared to a snap-built Zoid or Gundam, it leaves a lot to be desired. These Bandai Star Wars kits beg to be painted and weathered. I also just bought my first airbrush and a bunch of paints so I was ready to give this thing the attention it deserved!

Painting

I wanted to keep it fairly stock looking except for the main accent color. I was originally going to go with a pale green until my wife suggested purple. I had never seen a purple X-wing before so I picked up some Tamiya X-16 Purple and got to work.

After cutting and sanding all the pieces, I primed everything with Alclad Grey Primer (ALC 302) then sprayed just about every piece with a mix of 3:1 Tamiya X-2 White to XF-19 Sky Grey.

I then used a ton of masking tape to highlight the purple panels. These were sprayed with a 50/50 mix of Tamiya X-16 purple and Tamiya X-1 White.

The little enginey bits were painted with Tamiya X-10 Gun Metal... This didn't turn out quite like I had hoped. The black pigment separated in the airbrush which resulted in a much more silvery color than I was expecting.

Not quite what I had in mind, but these parts aren't that visible so I opted to continue rather than try again. It might have been my thinning ratios or something. I'm not sure.

The engine scoopy things and exhaust ports (I have no idea what these are actually called) were first sprayed with Alclad Gloss Black then Mr. Super Metallic 2 Super Iron 2. They have got to think of some better names!

Despite the crazy long paint name, the results were stunning! These look like actual metal! This paint is also super durable and was incredibly easy to airbrush. Since I'm so new to airbrushing, I didn't really have a strong preference for paint brands and types. I chose Tamiya to start because they had a wide selection of colors and I had a good experience with their spray cans. However, the Mr. Color Super Metallic 2 colors were incredibly impressive and I went out to pick up several more over the course of this project.

Anyway, the cockpit and some greebley bits were painted with Tamiya XF-84 Dark Iron then dry brushed with Tamiya XF-16 Flat Aluminum. They ended up looking pretty incredible for such a small amount of work. The canopy was sprayed with Tamiya XF-16 Flat Aluminum.

For some tonal variation, I picked out a few of the panels and painted them with Tamiya XF-19 Sky Grey.

It took a lot of masking tape...

Finally, I wanted to add the wing markings. I used the included decals as a guide and cut some masking tape templates. I then remade my purple mix and hand painted the purple lines. I used a random grey oil paint for the gray lines because I wanted it to look faded and sloppily painted on.

And with that, the base coat was complete! I could have assembled it then and there and had a pretty nice looking model.

Weathering

This is a Star Wars ship, though. It is required to be filthy! I have never weathered a kit before... Heck, I had never even painted a kit this size before. So this entire thing was a learning experience. I watched a ton of YouTube videos and read a ton of tutorials.

I started with chipping. I opted for the hand painted technique instead of using a sponge. Mainly because I just didn't have a sponge that wanted to work for me. They were all on strike. I practiced on a few spoons then went to work on the real thing.

For the grey areas, I first chipped with white to hopefully make it look like some of the paint had rubbed off and the primer was showing. I then went back over these white parts with the Tamiya XF-84 Dark Iron, staying just inside the white areas. This helped give it a 3D effect.

Do X-wings even use primer? Are they just bare durasteel? I began to question my sanity as I debated how fictional spaceships were painted.

Anyway, I did a similar technique on some of the purple pieces. I mixed a lighter shade of the purple for the "primer" then chipped inside that with the same Dark Iron. The results were... decent in some places, just alright in others. I like how it turned out on the wings and I definitely improved a bunch as I went, but I'm glad the later weathering steps helped cover this up a bit.

I definitely need more practice with the hand painted chipping technique. On the next kit I weather, I'll be using a sponge. Hopefully they'll be done striking at that point.

I finished snap building the kit, but kept some pieces loose in the event that I'd have to reach some nooks and crannies. I had a nearly factory fresh X-wing! I was very nervous for this next part... It would make or break the entire build and it too, would be a learning exercise.

But first, I sprayed the entire thing with some Alclad Aqua Gloss to lock in my existing paint detail and provide a smooth finish for the weathering effects.

I purchased a cheap set of oil paints off Amazon for about $10. I then mixed some ivory black with some burnt umber for a mostly black, but slightly brownish color then added a bunch of enamel thinner until I had a gross runny mixture.

I had no idea what I was doing, so I just slathered it all over the model until it was nice and gross looking.

24 hours later, it was still fairly wet, but not so wet that it all just wiped off. So I took several thousand Q-tips with a bit of enamel thinner and went to town wiping off most of the oil. This left grimy looking paint mostly confined to the nooks and crannies of the model. I didn't clean up my mixing cup so it had partially dried overnight. I used that partially dry paint to add a bunch of streaking effects all over the model.

Again, I had no real method. I just sort of went to town with my paint brush, streaking bits of paint in places that seemed to make sense and using enamel thinner to erase parts I didn't like. It became sort of like dry brushing. I'd dip the brush into the oil, wipe of most of the paint, then streak on the model until I was happy with the effect.

Not bad for a first attempt, I think.

The Figures

At the time of writing this, I still haven't finished painting the pilots... I sort of lost steam but will get to it eventually. For their flight suits I mixed Tamiya X-6 Orange with a bit of Tamiya X-7 Red until I found a color I was happy with but will never be able to replicate.

Once that dried, I hand painted the face with Tamiya XF-15 Flat Flesh, the visor with Tamiya X-8 Lemon Yellow, the helmet with Tamiya X-2 White, the boots with Tamiya X-9 Brown, and the gloves with Tamiya X-1 Black. I had a lot of issues with the orange paint reactivating as I painted on top of it. So midway through I switch to oils on the white, brown, and gray parts. These take ages to dry between coats.

That's where the pilots stand today.

The BB unit had a big seam running down the middle.

I used Tamiya cement to fuse the two parts together then sanded the line until smooth. This ended up being a mistake since I lost a lot of the side detail from the sanding. You can't really tell after it was painted though.

I used a random mix of Tamiya X-1 Black with Tamiya XF-19 Sky Grey to a dark grey color. I then hand painted the copper and aluminum bits with Tamiya XF-6 Copper and Tamiya XF-16 Flat Aluminum. Because my hand is not steady at all, I was pretty sloppy. So I mixed another round of dark grey to cover some of my metallic mistakes. I then painted random bits in this other dark grey color to make it look like intentional paint variation. In reality, I just couldn't replicate the original dark grey color properly.

The eye lenses were painted black and the whole thing was given a flat Alclad top coat. I then went back over the lenses with some Mr. Color clear gloss to give them a shiny appearance. The BB unit was complete. I call it BB-Q:

Oh, and I broke the antenna while assembling which immediately fell into my carpet and was lost forever. Where is Rey when you need her?

Lastly, I painted some detail in the cockpit using various random colors.

I let the X-wing's oils dry for about 2 weeks then masked off the metallic bits, and sealed it all up with the Alclad flat top coat.

I am thrilled with how this turned out! It was a lot of fun learning these new techniques and putting my new airbrush through its paces.

Thanks for reading!

You can find me on Instagram @GurStudios.

Have a nice day.